Fellow Passengers
A Novel in Portraits
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this novel by the author of The Golden Calves set in 1930s high society, a young man recounts the people in his life and what he's learned from them.
This superb gallery of portraits gathers its wit and resonance from the discerning eye of the central narrator, Dan Ruggles, who in the course of unraveling the dreams, doubts, and loyalties of those around him inevitably reveals his own.
Dan spends his boyhood in the company of old-money aunts from Bar Harbor and polo-playing uncles from Argentina. He stumbles upon the complexities of adulthood at Yale in the 1930s, and grows to worldly maturity at the Wall Street law firm that provides him not only with a vocation but with seemingly endless material for his fiction. Fellow passengers are the people in his life, each one a story and each one a lesson. Only Auchincloss can ferret out with such precision and understanding the secrets, foibles, and ironies that lie just beneath the proper Establishment surface. This is Louis Auchincloss at the top of his form—a book to please his many admirers and delightful introduction for new readers as well.
Praise for Fellow Passengers
"This gallery of American upper-class characters, Auchincloss's 41st book, reflects the acutely perceptive insight that distinguishes much of his fiction. Lineage, the right schools, clubs and marriages are of crucial concern to the matrons, debutantes, establishment bankers and lawyers whose vapid lives, as revealed in these stories, often founder on underpinnings of dark secrets and skewed loyalties . . . . Richly entertaining vignettes." —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Subtitled ``A Novel of Portraits,'' this gallery of American upper-class characters, Auchincloss's 41st book, reflects the acutely perceptive insight that distinguishes much of his fiction. Lineage, the right schools, clubs and marriages are of crucial concern to the matrons, debutantes, establishment bankers and lawyers whose vapid lives, as revealed in these stories, often founder on underpinnings of dark secrets and skewed loyalties. Our guide through this world of privilege and snobbery is the narrator, Dan Ruggles, who, growing up amid class-bound uncles and aunts in the 1930s, is destined to become enmeshed in the ``old boy'' network and the adult double-standard as it operates in the sexual and financial affairs of an exclusive social class. Auchincloss's urbane backgroundIvy League, Wall Street lawmakes him a virtuoso chronicler of the New York elite, and though these interrelated stories lack the coherence of his earlier, lauded novels, they are richly entertaining vignettes.
